You know what they say: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. These days it's most likely that impression will be online. In this piece, we consider the top five mistakes businesses make online that leave a bad taste in customers' mouths.

May 2015 Issue

Featured Stories

Having helped Digiday launch its Content Studio, Deanna Zammit knows better than anyone what it takes to create a successful native advertising department. After starting her career in journalism--complete with a stint at Adweek--and a turn at freelancing, Zammit happened to see a post on Facebook that announced Digiday was looking to find someone to head up its new Content Studio and said, "I can do that!"

There is perhaps nothing more exciting--and challenging--to the world of digital content creators than the idea of wearable devices, and Noble Ackerson is at the forefront of this burgeoning field. "I was fortunate to be brought in at the ground floor of Google's Glass Explorer program. And as one of the first explorers, I had the pleasure of interfacing with the Glass team quite a bit," he says. "The technical and user experience insights gained from being a so-called Glass Pioneer, coupled with a decade of technical and business experience, made my leap to wearables a natural one."

Numbers rarely tell the story, but sometimes, they can go a long way. Such is the case with the growth of YouTube as a branding platform, targeted advertising medium, and vehicle to reach consumers, especially younger ones. It's no longer just the home of cute cat videos and footage of an 8-year-old's first soccer goal; YouTube is a huge force in social media. Popular YouTube stars--known as influencers or creators--are every bit as popular and influential as Jennifer Lawrence and Jon Stewart. With the younger crowd, they hold a considerable amount of sway.

For many companies, "social video" is an enigmatic content format. However, Tania Yuki, founder and CEO of the social media marketing and analytics company Shareablee, believes brands simply need to look at social video as "designed to be consumed within ephemeral environments-easy to consume, fast to the point, involving some spectacle that makes it worth stopping what you're doing, and enjoying a brief immersive video experience." This definition separates social video from more evergreen formats, such as films or interviews.

The tools available to us are pushing new limits. Here at EContent, we turned to our inboxes, our coverage, and our contributors to find out what those trendsetting products are in 2015. We hope that you find these tools as interesting and as potentially helpful as we do!

Posted May 04, 2015

Columns

There are many lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of Gigaom. The thing that struck me, though, was that this seemed to be an argument for ad-supported media. You don't hear many of those these days. We're used to hearing about newspapers and websites shutting down after dwindling ad revenue is not enough to keep them afloat. We see The New York Times and its ilk instating paywalls to help pad the bottom line. Rarely, however, do we hear cautionary tales of companies that dared to experiment with different monetization strategies and lost.

Sure, using video for brand content has been around for a while. Short films, ads, and brand videos have been part of our lexicon for some time--but I believe we are coming into a video revolution, the likes of which we have not yet seen. Access to the tools necessary to create a kick-butt video campaign are getting cheaper, better, and more accessible by the day.

Content is everywhere. It's the lifeblood of business. But creating, managing, and delivering it are much bigger challenges than need be. That's because the most widely used content production methods are centered on a paper-based publishing paradigm that doesn't serve us as well today. Although we've made incremental changes during the past several decades, those improvements weren't optimized to address the rapid growth in customer touchpoints, distribution channels, devices, platforms, and constantly changing customer expectations.

But the concept of "Europe" is so frequently bandied about that it bears closer scrutiny. In an age when companies and brands are promoting themselves globally, it's a significant issue. Is there such a thing as "Europe?" Of course, European countries are united by many ?cultural norms and practices. At the same time, there are clear, practical distinctions that challenge cross-European campaigns. Content that works in one national market will not necessarily have the same impact in a different country.

Faces of EContent

Durant Gipson is a data analyst at AddThis, a media web-tracking technology company that provides a social bookmarking service. Most of his customers are internal, including product managers, developers, marketing team members, account managers, and the executive team. "My job is to answer questions with our data and to provide some intelligence alongside. That might include conversion rates on a widget, the volume of page views we see for a new publisher, identifying the largest domains for specific countries, or the synchronization rate for a specific data partner," Gipson says.

Case Studies

Launched in 2013, Plano, Texas-based ITContract.com describes itself as "a specialist employment solutions website designed to make job hunt and talent sourcing faster and smarter." The site is specifically geared toward people looking for jobs in the IT field-both in the U.S. and abroad. ITContract wanted to develop a better job-searching experience for its customers: Make navigation of the site faster? and also provide filters to help people narrow down what they're looking for.